Beating the odds - June 2012, six cyclists, having come together as a team less than a day before, would accomplish what many thought to be impossible: race tandem bicycles for 10 hours through biblical thunderstorms, up and down gnarly steep dirt roads, and finish as friends.

First Tandem Century

This report was written by Dena Cohen, aka The Mad Scientist

On Thursday evening, I
agreed to captain a tandem that I had never ridden on a 120 mile race
course with 13,000 feet of climbing on mostly dirt roads. Of all of the
crazy things that Pamela Blalock has ever suggested that I do (and
there have been many), this was by far the craziest. Although I’d
certainly captained a tandem before, and ridden dirt roads before, I’d
never done both at the same time, and never with Pamela as my stoker.
Nonetheless, team Epic Avengers was desperate for one more captain after
some last minute cancellations, and I love a challenge.

On
Friday afternoon, I headed over to Pamela’s for a quick test ride
before departure. For better or worse, but mostly better, we couldn’t
get the cockpit of Ride Studio Café’s ultra-light titanium Seven Cycles
tandem to be small enough to fit me, so we ended up riding on John and
Pamela’s Comotion Mocha, which is a much heavier machine but has the
advantage of an extraordinarily low gear, which featured prominently in
our experience of the race itself. We took the bike around the block
twice and didn’t die, which we took that as evidence that all would be
well on race day. Using the strength of three people we hoisted the
bike onto the roof of Pamela’s car, and headed to New Hampshire.

On
race-day morning at 5:30, the full complement of Epic Avengers
assembled for the first time, for breakfast at a local diner. I had my
stand-by cycling breakfast of eggs, toast, homefries, and hot sauce with
plenty of salt. I had a feeling I would need every calorie and every
gram of sodium, and I was not wrong. After fooling around with the
bikes in the parking lot at the start and doing some last minute test
riding, we rolled off the race start and through some paved roads
towards the first dirt section.

It became clear
immediately that Pamela and I were going to have to give it absolutely
everything we had not to be completely left in the dust by our stronger
teammates. We frequently experienced the optical illusion of Todd,
Patria, John, and Rebecca getting smaller when the road turned up-hill.
This illusion was enhanced by the fact that we were having some issues
with chain suck, and had to stop a couple of times to sort out our drive
train before moving on. We were working far too hard to talk, which
was fine since Pamela and I ran out of things to talk about on bike
rides about five years ago.

From the day I met him, I have
been in awe of John Bayley’s cycling skills, but never more so than on
this race course. Staying in control of a huge, heavy bike that has a
tendency to shoot like a missile down hills, and is remarkably slow to
respond to subtle obstacle-avoidance maneuvers, is incredibly hard. Add
to that the fact that you have a helpless passenger whose safety you
really care about clinging on for dear life behind you, and you find
yourself in a state of constant hyper-vigilance, trying to see around
every bend and to interpret every subtle change in color of the road
surface for clues about what is going to happen next. John does this
with such grace, skill, good humor, and seeming effortlessness, and at
such an incredible rate of speed, it really boggles the mind. Todd
appears to be cut from the same last. In other words, I was a hack in
the company of professionals. Luckily, Pamela is an expert
stoker—strong, smooth, patient, trusting, and calm—and that saved us on
multiple occasions.

My nearest miss of the ride came
relatively early on, when I carried a little too much speed into a
left-hand bend at the bottom of a hill, and hit a patch of sandy gravel
that was looser than it looked. I felt the rear wheel start to skid
away, which is really not the best feeling in the world. Somehow, I
managed to hold onto it, straighten out of the turn and bring the bike
to a gentle stop in the upright position on some grass beyond the edge
of the road. Pamela must have hit the emergency eject button because I
swear she was off the bike before we’d even come to a complete stop. A
fellow cyclist who was standing nearby yelled out, “Nice save!” Pamela
and I breathed a sigh of relief, pointed the tandem back in the desired
direction of travel, and headed on.

Those of you who have
ridden with me know that I am generally a conservative cyclist, and
like to take it slow out of the start to save energy for whatever might
lie ahead. On this ride, I was burning matches from mile one. That
combined with the rising temperatures and the difficulty of drinking
enough water while captaining on rough roads (I wasn’t about to take my
hands off the bars!) had me over-heating and a bit dehydrated pretty
early on. The first rest stop at mile 33 didn’t provide much relief
since they had sold out of chilled water before our arrival and in any
case we only hung around for about 30 seconds, or so it seemed. From
there the climbing seemed absolutely relentless and I was fantasizing
about cold Sprite and smoothies constantly.

All the heat
and climbing came to a head for me on a huge paved climb out in the sun
around the midpoint of the ride. As we came to the crest of the climb, a
little tent appeared, full of nice people from Strava with coolers of
ice-cold orange soda. Having downed two cans in about 3 minutes, I felt
quite a bit better. Since the clouds were gathering, we hopped back on
the bikes quickly and made for lower ground. I should point out that
“lower ground” was a relative and transitory concept in this ride, since
we never actually stayed at any one elevation for longer than a moment
or two anywhere on the course.

The skies opened up and unleashed with one of the most severe thunderstorms I’ve ever ridden through. Intense rain,
hail,
wind, and lightening were all around us. The road turned into a rocky
stream bed, just in time for one of the biggest descents of the ride. I
hung onto the brakes and tried to keep us out of the biggest puddles
and on the road, not always the easiest combination of goals. Somehow,
miraculously, we made it to the bottom where there was a store and about
40 other wet, insane people on bicycles. Pamela and I got of the bike
and both spontaneously shouted “We lived!” Moments later I was sipping
hot chocolate and trying to remember why it was that I had been craving
cold soda earlier in the day. I was so thrilled not to be hot anymore
that I didn’t mind being wet. Unlike the rest of the Epic Avengers, I
have what we refer to politely as “enhanced thermal mass,” so I wasn’t
cold and shivering. In fact, I felt better than I had all day, except
for an overall sense of unease about doing more dirt descents in that
weather. Everyone else put on Rapha rain vests (ie, trash bag ponchos)
and we moved on.

This whole portion of the ride was such
blur of wetness, dirt, hills, rocks, and mechanicals that it’s hard for
me to keep straight in my mind the order in which things happened.
There was one section that was so muddy and rocky that, after sort of
falling into a ditch that was where the middle of the road should have
been, we decided to walk until conditions improved. I burned through so
much of our front brake pads on the subsequent descents that we had to
stop and have John help us tighten up the front brake. Then only
minutes later I hit a hole that was much bigger than it looked, and the
rear brake lever locked up completely. When we caught up with John he
figured out that, since I had been riding with my hands on the brake
hoods, the force of the impact had actually forced the entire brake
lever assembly down the bars by over a centimeter, thereby jamming it.
We got that adjusted and then headed on, searching for Todd and Patria
who were somewhere far ahead of us, probably writing a novel or
performing ancient weather-related ceremonies.

Finally, as
we came up to a left turn, the race organizer popped out of a car and
told us that he was closing the course and sending all the riders back
to the start along a direct, paved route. Todd and Patria emerged from
the garage of the house they had built while waiting for us, and we all
made our way over to a gas station to fuel up for the final push for
home. Riding up to the gas station, the bike started making yet another
noise, a sort of soothing metal-on-metal screech. John, who was by
then heartily sick of looking at our brakes, diagnosed the problem as a
complete lack of any sort of brake pad material on the front disc
brake. Fortunately, the brake-shoe-on-rotor combination proved
sufficient for all our remaining stopping needs, since somehow we’d
neglected to pack spare pads.

Just in time for the paved,
relatively flat ride back to the start, the rain lifted off and it was
like the whole nightmare in the woods never happened. I remembered that
riding a tandem could be fast, fun, and easy—a set of concepts that I’d
forgotten about entirely during the previous hours. Todd had some
choice words for the state of Vermont as we sailed across a bridge and
back into New Hampshire. We rolled back into the starting area at 100.7
miles and about 10,000 feet climbed/descended. We were indescribably
filthy, relieved, exhausted, and happy. And that, in summary, was how I
captained my first century.

1 comment:

Thank you very much for your perspective on this most challenging ride. It is inspiring to see your courage and ability in accepting out of the blue such an unexpected but daunting athletic and technical challenge and performing so impressively. Those of us that can't do what you did here can admire and take heart from it and salute you for your accomplishment. Well done! Jim Duncan

Blog Archive

Epic Avengers

Team Roster - click on photo for individual bios. Kryptonite was slipped to some of our original team. New Avengers for 2012 - Dena Cohen, Patria Lanfranchi and Rebecca Fetner save the day!

The Jokester

Todd Holland

The Cafe Stoker

Patria Lanfranchi

ShammyRocker (Irish Rocker of Chamois)

John Bayley

The PR Maestro

Rebecca Fetner

The Mad Scientist

Dena Cohen

Bat Whisperer

Pamela Blalock

Felled by Kryptonite...

Mother of Three

Kristen Gohr

The Fixer

David Lafferty

Vampire Slayer

Emily Searles Lafferty

Rapha Gents Race NE 2011 - The 52 Vincents

Beating the odds - Nearly one year ago, six cyclists, barely strangers, would accomplish what many thought to be impossible: race tandem bicycles for ~9 hours without even seeing another cyclist. It was in fact, just odd.